Knative

Essential base primitives for all

Knative provides a set of middleware components that are essential to build modern, source-centric, and container-based applications that can run anywhere: on premises, in the cloud, or even in a third-party data center. Knative components are built on Kubernetes and codify the best practices shared by successful real-world Kubernetes-based frameworks. It enables developers to focus just on writing interesting code, without worrying about the “boring but difficult” parts of building, deploying, and managing an application.

Developer-friendly software

Knative offers a set of reusable components that focuses on solving many mundane but difficult tasks such as orchestrating source-to-container workflows, routing and managing traffic during deployment, auto-scaling your workloads, or binding running services to eventing ecosystems. Developers can even use familiar idioms, languages, and frameworks to deploy any workload: functions, applications, or containers.

Supports popular development patterns

Knative focuses on an idiomatic developer experience. It supports common development patterns such as GitOps, DockerOps, ManualOps, as well as tools and frameworks such as Django, Ruby on Rails, Spring, and many more.

Best of both worlds: Flexibility and control

Knative is designed to plug easily into existing build and CI/CD toolchains. By focusing on open-source-first technologies that run anywhere, on any cloud, on any infrastructure supported by Kubernetes, enterprises are free to move their workloads wherever they run best. This offers the flexibility and control customers need to adapt the system to their own unique requirements.

Operator-friendly

Knative is designed to be run as a service by all major cloud providers. Google currently works with industry leaders such as Pivotal, SAP, Red Hat, IBM, and many others to create the building blocks that will best suit the needs of developers. Knative powers real-world workloads and is also compatible with other cutting-edge technologies such as Kubernetes and Istio.

Run your serverless workloads on Kubernetes Engine

You can now run your serverless workloads on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) by enabling the serverless add-on. Powered by Knative, the serverless add-on helps developers orchestrate builds, serving, and events with a single click, enabling the benefits of an idiomatic developer experience with the flexibility and control of GKE.

Knative features

Feature Name

Feature Description

Serving

Scale to zero, request-driven compute model

Build

Cloud-native source to container orchestration

Events

Universal subscription, delivery and management of events

Serverless add-on on GKE

Enable GCP managed serverless stack on Kubernetes

Knative helps our developers focus on building the business logic rather than worrying about building low-level platform capabilities such as build, deploy, autoscaling, monitoring, and observability. For example, our T-Mobile store locator app developed in Java/Vert.x was easy to migrate to GCP using Knative. We did that in just a sprint as Knative provided lot of platform-level capabilities that our developers did not have to build.

Ram Gopinathan, Principal Technology Architect, T-Mobile

Resources

Install Knative

Installation guide for the latest version of Knative using pre-built images